2010 saw a shift from the doomsday death-of-print outlook of recent years to a reinvigorated optimism about the enduring power of storytelling. With the rise of cutting-edge online journals, standout success among smaller press houses, and a recent Google initiative that will help boost indie publishers’ sales, we’re entering a new era of literary promise that has converted doomsday negativity into fuel for imagination and creativity. To get a better peek into this new literary world order, we chatted with Rae Bryant, a boundary-pushing writer as well as the founder and editor-in-chief of Moon Milk Review (MMR), a fresh online magazine at the vanguard of all this activity and innovation. So read on to learn more about the future of literature — medium, media, and method be damned.
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Now that everyone seems to be getting a book deal, a straight autobiography just doesn’t cut it anymore. Fortunately, as the number of gratuitous celebrity bios has increased, so too has the originality of books by the writers who are actual professionals in the medium. In the past year, we’ve seen the traditional autobiography in particular veer in several unique directions — not least of which is beyond the grave — so check out these five recent alternatives to the classic genre archetype, and you’ll understand why these authors really deserve a book deal.
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Any meal is immediately improved by a stylistic theme — and, no, we don’t just mean of the murder mystery variety. After hearing about Vinegar Hill House’s American Psycho inspired New Year Eve’s menu, we got to thinking about other books that would make for great dinner party premises. You can choose from the following fantasy menus based on literary taste, and remember to have guests complete the bookish tone by appropriately dressing up as their favorite character.
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Like film geek predecessors such as Jean-Luc Godard or Quentin Tarantino, Joel and Ethan Coen’s success as filmmakers stems from their love of the form. And yet, the Coen Brothers’ films are also marked by complex allusions and literary references, profound narrative insights that are often plumbed from a different medium entirely. Some movies such as No Country for Old Men, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and their latest True Grit are direct screen adaptations of classic stories, but there’s plenty of between-the-lines literary references in their other work. With this bookish background in mind, here’s a guide to authors whose influence can be seen throughout the Coen Brothers’ oeuvre.
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Unlike most other gift options, books manage to be simultaneously personal and safely neutral. The giver and the receiver each benefit from the literary implications of such a categorical choice, leaving only the substance of the title in question as the remaining variable. To ease the options of what to pick, we’ve combed this year’s releases for the best books that will suit the different types of people in your life.
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We’re all familiar with classic Christmas tales of outcast mutant reindeer, hallucinating old men, and thieving green goblin cartoons, but there are plenty of other holiday parables and stories that spin a more unconventional twist on the year-end holiday. Whether you celebrate or not, here are ten alternative Christmas accounts whose offbeat weirdness will add any needed merriment to this holiday weekend.
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Although we’re no longer bound to become blacksmiths or bakers based on our parents’ jobs, there are some professional skills that persist from one generation to the next. We’ve recently seen the power of artistic genetics with the release of Sophie Crumb’s first book (edited by her father Robert, no less), but it seems that literary DNA is particularly potent. With the holiday season now upon us — and with it, inevitable reunions with close family and distant relatives alike — here’s a toast to ten families for whom writing is part of the inherited legacy.
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Even as our lives become ever more digitalized, the beauty of the printed page continues to hold sway. Take Jonathan Safran Foer’s recent literary dissection of Bruno Schultz’s novel The Street of Crocodiles, which he painstakingly pruned in order to create an entirely new story. Although the concept was more literary experiment than arts and crafts hack-job, the resulting book is a visually stunning reinvention of its preexisting form. To illustrate the multimedia value of this alternative usage, here are ten artists who have transformed traditional texts into works of genuine art.
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Whether retroactively penned by adoring fans, postmodern literary pranksters, or the original authors themselves, imaginary books have a way of eventually making their way into reality, evolving from two-dimensional plot props into real published tomes. Although we’ve already made a wishlist of reads we wish fictional characters would write — and indeed over in TV-land, characters from Mad Men’s Roger Sterling to Californication’s Hank Moody have also had their fictional volumes published on this side of the screen — here are five real books that exemplify literary life imitating fictional art.
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Anyone waiting for the vampire craze to subside is in for a world of disappointment. Although the current “twihard” population is certainly the loudest and most obnoxious of the genre’s fans, there have actually been vampire lit cults for years — and, yes, we mean farther back than Interview with the Vampire. Long before Bram Stoker created his iconic Count Dracula, this supernatural creature had transitioned from rural folklore to the printed page with great success in 19th-century pop culture. Here are five now-forgotten stories from vampire literature’s early days — ranging from spooky to sexy — that will seduce even the most vamp-averse.
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